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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 361 records · Page 20
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2016

SNAPSHOT: A MODERN, SUSTAINABLE HOLDUP MEASUREMENT SYSTEM

SNAPSHOT is a software platform designed to eventually replace Holdup Measurement System 4 (HMS 4), which is the current state-of-the-art for acquisition and analysis of nondestructive assay measurement data for in situ nuclear materials, holdup, in support of criticality safety and material control and accounting. HMS 4 is over 10 years old and is currently unsustainable due to hardware and software incompatibilities that have arisen from advances in detector electronics, primarily updates to multi-channel analyzers (MCAs), and both computer and handheld operating systems. SNAPSHOT is a complete redesign of HMS 4 that addresses the issue of compatibility with modern MCAs and operating systems and that is designed with a flexible architecture to support long-term sustainability. It also provides an updated and more user friendly interface and is being developed under an NQA 1 software quality assurance (SQA) program to facilitate site acceptance for safety-related applications. This paper provides an overview of the SNAPSHOT project including details of the software development process, the SQA program, and the architecture designed to support sustainability.

Rowe, Nathan C↗
NASA NTRS1995

Telescience operations with the solar array module plasma interaction experiment

The Solar Array Module Plasma Interactions Experiment (SAMPIE) is a flight experiment that flew on the Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-62) in March 1994, as part of the OAST-2 mission. The overall objective of SAMPIE was to determine the adverse environmental interactions within the space plasma of low earth orbit (LEO) on modern solar cells and space power system materials which are artificially biased to high positive and negative direct current (DC) voltages. The two environmental interactions of interest included high voltage arcing from the samples to the space plasma and parasitic current losses. High voltage arcing can cause physical damage to power system materials and shorten expected hardware life. parasitic current losses can reduce power system efficiency because electric currents generated in a power system drain into the surrounding plasma via parasitic resistance. The flight electronics included two programmable high voltage DC power supplies to bias the experiment samples, instruments to measure the surrounding plasma environment in the STS cargo bay, and the on-board data acquisition system (DAS). The DAS provided in-flight experiment control, data storage, and communications through the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) Hitchhiker flight avionics to the GSFC Payload Operations Control Center (POCC). The DAS and the SAMPIE POCC computer systems were designed for telescience operations; this paper will focus on the experiences of the SAMPIE team regarding telescience development and operations from the GSFC POCC during STS-62. The SAMPIE conceptual development, hardware design, and system verification testing were accomplished at the NASA Lewis Research Center (LeRC). SAMPIE was developed under the In-Space Technology Experiment Program (IN-STEP), which sponsors NASA, industry, and university flight experiments designed to enable and enhance space flight technology. The IN-STEP Program is sponsored by the Office of Space Access and Technology (OSAT).

Wald, Lawrence W.↗
NASA NTRS2003

Setting up a Grid: A Guide for Beginners by a Beginner

A simple compute grid can be constructed for under $ 1,000 with 5 computers on a LAN for the purpose of video compression from captured digital video to MPEG file format. The process for setting up this grid will be covered in detail, including the required operating systems and hardware, the required globus software, and the required video capture and compression software. Pitfalls encountered will be discussed, and the approximate timeline for a motivated but uninformed beginner. The installation, configuration, and operation of additional software that is needed test, measure and otherwise verify that the grid components are functioning as "advertised", will also be presented. This is a true life account for setting up a grid based on instructions in Chapters 9 and 10 of Introduction to Grid Computing with Globus.

Welch, Clara↗
NASA NTRS2005

Hardware platforms for MEMS gyroscope tuning based on evolutionary computation using open-loop and closed -loop frequency response

We propose a tuning method for MEMS gyroscopes based on evolutionary computation to efficiently increase the sensitivity of MEMS gyroscopes through tuning. The tuning method was tested for the second generation JPL/Boeing Post-resonator MEMS gyroscope using the measurement of the frequency response of the MEMS device in open-loop operation. We also report on the development of a hardware platform for integrated tuning and closed loop operation of MEMS gyroscopes. The control of this device is implemented through a digital design on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The hardware platform easily transitions to an embedded solution that allows for the miniaturization of the system to a single chip.

evolvable hardware↗
NASA NTRS1994

Evaluation of SSME test data reduction methods

Accurate prediction of hardware and flow characteristics within the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) during transient and main-stage operation requires a significant integration of ground test data, flight experience, and computational models. The process of integrating SSME test measurements with physical model predictions is commonly referred to as data reduction. Uncertainties within both test measurements and simplified models of the SSME flow environment compound the data integration problem. The first objective of this effort was to establish an acceptability criterion for data reduction solutions. The second objective of this effort was to investigate the data reduction potential of the ROCETS (Rocket Engine Transient Simulation) simulation platform. A simplified ROCETS model of the SSME was obtained from the MSFC Performance Analysis Branch . This model was examined and tested for physical consistency. Two modules were constructed and added to the ROCETS library to independently check the mass and energy balances of selected engine subsystems including the low pressure fuel turbopump, the high pressure fuel turbopump, the low pressure oxidizer turbopump, the high pressure oxidizer turbopump, the fuel preburner, the oxidizer preburner, the main combustion chamber coolant circuit, and the nozzle coolant circuit. A sensitivity study was then conducted to determine the individual influences of forty-two hardware characteristics on fourteen high pressure region prediction variables as returned by the SSME ROCETS model.

Santi, L. Michael↗
DOE OSTI2016

Samba: A Detailed Memory Management Unit (MMU) for the SST Simulation Framework

The Memory Management Unit (MMU) is one of the most important parts of any modern computing system. It can be thought of as the hardware support for virtual memory, which enforces access permissions, and manages the translation of processes' virtual addresses into real memory physical addresses. The operating system (OS) allocates the physical memory in a small granularity frames that can be accessed by processes with appropriate permissions. Each process has the illusion of having an entire memory space, however, the actual addresses issued by the process, (`virtual addresses'), are translated into the physical frame address allocated by the OS through virtual memory.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
NASA NTRS1979

Operator Station Design System - A computer aided design approach to work station layout

The Operator Station Design System is resident in NASA's Johnson Space Center Spacecraft Design Division Performance Laboratory. It includes stand-alone minicomputer hardware and Panel Layout Automated Interactive Design and Crew Station Assessment of Reach software. The data base consists of the Shuttle Transportation System Orbiter Crew Compartment (in part), the Orbiter payload bay and remote manipulator (in part), and various anthropometric populations. The system is utilized to provide panel layouts, assess reach and vision, determine interference and fit problems early in the design phase, study design applications as a function of anthropometric and mission requirements, and to accomplish conceptual design to support advanced study efforts.

Lewis, J. L.↗
NASA NTRS2012

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Command and Data Handling Flight Electronics Subsystem

A document describes a high-performance, modular, and state-of-the-art Command and Data Handling (C&DH) system developed for use on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission. This system implements a complete hardware C&DH subsystem in a single chassis enclosure that includes a processor card, 48 Gbytes of solid-state recorder memory, data buses including MIL-STD-1553B, custom RS-422, SpaceWire, analog collection, switched power services, and interfaces to the Ka-Band and S-Band RF communications systems. The C&DH team capitalized on extensive experience with hardware and software with PCI bus design, SpaceWire networking, Actel FPGA design, digital flight design techniques, and the use of VxWorks for the real-time operating system. The resulting hardware architecture was implemented to meet the LRO mission requirements. The C&DH comprises an enclosure, a backplane, a low-voltage power converter, a single-board computer, a communications interface board, four data storage boards, a housekeeping and digital input/output board, and an analog data acquisition board. The interfaces between the C&DH and the instruments and avionics are connected through a SpaceWire network, a MIL-STD-1553 bus, and a combination of synchronous and asynchronous serial data transfers over RS-422 and LVDS (low-voltage differential-signaling) electrical interfaces. The C&DH acts as the spacecraft data system with an instrument data manager providing all software and internal bus scheduling, ingestion of science data, distribution of commands, and performing science operations in real time.

Nguyen, Quang↗
DOE OSTI2022

Time-Efficient Qudit Gates through Incremental Pulse Re-seeding

Current efforts to build quantum computers focus mainly on the two-state qubit, which often involves suppressing readily-available higher states. In this work, we break this abstraction and synthesize short-duration control pulses for gates on generalized d-state qudits. We present Incremental Pulse Reseeding, a practical scheme to guide optimal control software to the lowest-duration pulse by iteratively seeding the optimizer with previous results. We find a near-linear relationship between Hilbert space dimension and gate duration through explicit pulse optimization for one- and two-qudit gates on transmons. Furthermore, our results suggest that qudit operations are much more efficient than previously expected in the practical regime of interest and have the potential to significantly increase the computational power of current hardware.

pulse synthesis↗
DOE OSTI2015

HPC - Facilities Penta

Strategy, Planning, Acquiring- very large scale computing require very large physical infrastructures, pipes, pumps, power, etc. Planning and acquiring $25M+ infrastructure projects and bringing in more power to the county takes a lot of long lead time / planning. Integration- New physical infrastructure must be integrated into our buildings, with the LANL site power and water systems, with existing infrastructure, and with the machines. Very large physical infrastructure projects are necessary. Management and Utilization – Ongoing operations, monitoring, maintenance, and trouble shooting of the physical infrastructure is required.

Computer Hardware↗
NASA NTRS1985

WEST-3 wind turbine simulator development. Volume 1: Summary

This report is a summary description of WEST-3, a new real-time wind turbine simulator developed by Paragon Pacific Inc. WEST-3 is an all digital, fully programmable, high performance parallel processing computer. Contained in the report are descriptions of the WEST-3 hardware and software. WEST-3 consists of a network of Computational Units (CUs) working in parallel. Each CU is a custom designed high speed digital processor operating independently of other CUs. The CU, which is the main building block of the system, is described in some detail. A major contributor to the high performance of the system is the use a unique method for transferring data among the CUs. The software aspects of WEST-3 covered in the report include the preparation of the simulation model (reformulation, scaling and normalization), and the use of the system software (Translator, Linker, Assembler and Loader). Also given is a description of the wind turbine simulation model used in WEST-3, and some sample results from a study conducted to validate the system. Finally, efforts currently underway to enhance the user friendliness of the system are outlined; these include the 32-bit floating point capability, and major improvements in system software.

Sridhar, S.↗
NASA NTRS1994

High performance real-time flight simulation at NASA Langley

In order to meet the stringent time-critical requirements for real-time man-in-the-loop flight simulation, computer processing operations must be deterministic and be completed in as short a time as possible. This includes simulation mathematical model computational and data input/output to the simulators. In 1986, in response to increased demands for flight simulation performance, personnel at NASA's Langley Research Center (LaRC), working with the contractor, developed extensions to a standard input/output system to provide for high bandwidth, low latency data acquisition and distribution. The Computer Automated Measurement and Control technology (IEEE standard 595) was extended to meet the performance requirements for real-time simulation. This technology extension increased the effective bandwidth by a factor of ten and increased the performance of modules necessary for simulator communications. This technology is being used by more than 80 leading technological developers in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Included among the commercial applications of this technology are nuclear process control, power grid analysis, process monitoring, real-time simulation, and radar data acquisition. Personnel at LaRC have completed the development of the use of supercomputers for simulation mathematical model computational to support real-time flight simulation. This includes the development of a real-time operating system and the development of specialized software and hardware for the CAMAC simulator network. This work, coupled with the use of an open systems software architecture, has advanced the state of the art in real time flight simulation. The data acquisition technology innovation and experience with recent developments in this technology are described.

Cleveland, Jeff I., II↗
NASA NTRS1995

Telemetry Frame Processor

Report describes program for creating and editing telemetry frames on personal computer. Menu-driven and creates or edits digital telemetry manually or automatically by occurrence of event. Stream of telemetric data used to test operation of hardware and software parts of telemetry-receiving station. Program useful in satellite-data-processing facilities like remote-sensing stations.

Lewis, Steve E.↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Planning for Compilation of a Quantum Algorithm for Graph Coloring

Recently, the problem of compiling general quantum algorithms for implementation on near-term quantum processors has been introduced to the AI community. Previous work demonstrated that temporal planning is an attractive approach for part of this compilation task, specifically, the routing of circuits that implement the Quantum Alternating Operator Ansatz (QAOA) applied to theMaxCut problem on a quantum processor architecture. In this paper, we extend the earlier work to route circuits that implement QAOAfor Graph Coloring problems. QAOA for coloring requires execution of more, and more complex, operations on the chip, which makes routing a more challenging problem. We evaluate the approach on state-of-the-art hardware architectures from leading quantum computing companies. Additionally, we investigate applying the planning approach to qubit initialization as well as routing. Our empirical evaluation shows that temporal planning compares well to reasonable analytic upper bounds [20], and that solving qubit initialization with a classical planner generally helps temporal planners in finding shorter-makespan compilations for QAOA for Graph Coloring.These advances suggest that temporal planning can be an effective approach for more complex quantum computing algorithms and architectures.

Minh Do↗
NASA NTRS2006

Core Community Specifications for Electron Microprobe Operating Systems: Software, Quality Control, and Data Management Issues

Modem electron microprobe systems have become increasingly sophisticated. These systems utilize either UNIX or PC computer systems for measurement, automation, and data reduction. These systems have undergone major improvements in processing, storage, display, and communications, due to increased capabilities of hardware and software. Instrument specifications are typically utilized at the time of purchase and concentrate on hardware performance. The microanalysis community includes analysts, researchers, software developers, and manufacturers, who could benefit from exchange of ideas and the ultimate development of core community specifications (CCS) for hardware and software components of microprobe instrumentation and operating systems.

Fournelle, John↗
NASA NTRS2002

Pre-Hardware Optimization of Spacecraft Image Processing Algorithms and Hardware Implementation

Spacecraft telemetry rates and telemetry product complexity have steadily increased over the last decade presenting a problem for real-time processing by ground facilities. This paper proposes a solution to a related problem for the Geostationary Operational Environmental Spacecraft (GOES-8) image data processing and color picture generation application. Although large super-computer facilities are the obvious heritage solution, they are very costly, making it imperative to seek a feasible alternative engineering solution at a fraction of the cost. The proposed solution is based on a Personal Computer (PC) platform and synergy of optimized software algorithms, and reconfigurable computing hardware (RC) technologies, such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) and Digital Signal Processors (DSP). It has been shown that this approach can provide superior inexpensive performance for a chosen application on the ground station or on-board a spacecraft.

Kizhner, Semion↗
DOE OSTI2026

Microsecond-latency feedback at a particle accelerator by online reinforcement learning on hardware

The commissioning and operation of future large-scale scientific experiments will challenge current tuning and control methods. Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are a promising solution due to their ability to dynamically adapt to changing environments and consider delayed consequences. In many real-world applications, RL policies must produce actions in real time, often within microseconds to milliseconds, imposing significant constraints on system latency and computational overhead that conventional machine learning libraries are not designed to handle. To control phenomena in real time at these timescales, RL needs to be deployed on-the-edge, namely on dedicated hardware located near the system it controls, without relying on a host CPU or cloud-based inference. In this work we present the design and deployment of an experience accumulator system in a particle accelerator. In this system, deep-RL algorithms run using hardware acceleration and act within a few microseconds, enabling the use of RL for control of phenomena like beam instabilities. The training uses the collected data offline to reduce the number of operations carried out on the acceleration hardware. The proposed architecture was tested in real experimental conditions at the Karlsruhe research accelerator, a synchrotron light source, where the system was used to control artificially induced horizontal betatron oscillations in real-time, with a control loop period of just 2.7 μs. The results showed a performance comparable to the commercial feedback system available at the accelerator, demonstrating the viability and potential of this approach. Due to the self-learning and reconfiguration capability of this implementation, a seamless application to other control problems is possible. Applications range from particle accelerators to large-scale research and industrial facilities.

FPGA↗